"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)."Erik Keilholtz

Under the patronage of St. Tammany

Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children.Email

The Democrats have gone so ape-wild on Not-Bush, I would shed no tears if they pitched another election opportunity, difficult as it might be for me to swallow another four years of a W-Cabal. Some would say the D-Party needs a soul, but I think a chandelier with mostly working bulbs would help.

As I've written here before, I would like to be a Democrat. I was born one, and if today I disagree with the Dems on just about every major issue, the GOP still isn't home. Problem is, the party I'd prefer to belong to was captured by the Left 32 years ago. Liberal I'm all right with; a Leftist I am most decidedly not.

It's worth noting the Bush foreign-policy neoconservatives Democrats so roundly revile are themselves former Scoop Jackson Democrats. Indeed, their late mentor, Sen. Jackson, domestic liberal, Cold War hawk, was one of the revered statesmen of the Democratic Party. I remember as a teenager being for him in the '76 primaries. I believe the Democrats today would be hard to beat if they were strong on defense, championed America and freedom on the world stage, looked out for the little guy, and maintained at least a residual respect for the moral and religious values of Main Street America – in short, if it returned to being the Democratic Party of FDR, Harry Truman, JFK and Scoop Jackson.

Remember, in '68, that formative year for the Vietnam War Boomer Generation, the liberals were the Democrats like LBJ and Humphrey who were being called baby-killers and fascists for pressing the war against the Communists in Indochina. The protesters doing the yelling were Leftists. (There's a difference.) The Left prevailed in the Democratic Party, which today bows to Woodrow Wilson while being animated by the spirit of Emma Goldman.

Today's Bush-whackers don't recognize in W's hawkishness the legacy of the old Democracy's muscular liberal internationalism. In the spirit of lost causes, here are a number of links to articles on Scoop Jackson and his legacy: